NVidia drivers 82.69

[johnpapgr]

You should know exactly since you wrote a patch, don't you?

No, I didn't. Read again the quoted text in your own post. It's RLoew's patch we're talking about. I just quoted him here because his original post about it was in the Compatible Hardware with Windows 9x, and I thought it belonged here also. In that I was right, because you noticed it here, not there. Now, I have 3 GiB of RAM in my machine, but only a Geforce2 MX 400 32MB VRAM. So I've never encoutered the issue myself. But you can find it referenced along this selfsame thread, many times. AFAIK, what happens is the system does not finish booting up. Now, if you're willing to test the patch, you'll need to add more RAM. And I think this issue is not related to the hanging shut-down. In any case, to test the patch you should contact RLoew either by PM or by e-mail to the address indicated in his original post.

I see... Now I can't test the patch either. You see I have 512MB system RAM which is the maximum for my Intel 815EP chipset...

[robertbaer]

Well, after a lot of trouble getting an un-corrupted NV8269 driver set, there wre oter problems.

Installing it came up with the following absurdity: "no NVIDIA chip found".

But the ASUS motherboard M2N-MX SE Plus has an on-board video NVIDIA chip, and the video board i am using also uses an NVIDIA chip!

So i decided to ignore that and use the Control Panel Display Advanced section and select the driver OR did i try "add new hardware" (so long ago i do not remember); got the message again.

Forcing useage of the driver gives a lot of grief: 640x480 16 colors AT BEST!

Patched registry to read Windows XP and 5.10.2600 everywhere appropiate.

Installed Unicows.DLL and registered it

Installed KernelEX

Modified \Bootsec.DOS (to read MSWIN 5.1 and WIN XP)

Modified \MSDOS.SYS (to read MSWIN 5.1)

Modified \Windows\Winver.exe (to read 5.10.6200 and Windows XP in 2 places)

Modified \Windows\W98setup.bin (to read 5.10.6200 in 2 places)

Modified \Windows\Command.com

*Negative effect: MSDOS shell doesn't work (because KernelEx eates conventional memory, i think).

Even after all of that, sysinfo gives: Microsoft Windows XP 4.10.2222 A

And the ASUS motherboard CD barfs complaining about "WIN_4.11".

So, how the heck do i fix it?

[eidenk]

Well I don't think you can install drivers for a Socket AM2+ with nVidia chipset on 98/ME at all but it is interesting enough to know you can actually install and run the OS on it.

Perhaps you could report in this thread as well :

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=97588

As for the graphic card have you tried the drivers posted in the first post ?

[Kwibus]

Which driver do you use for the ACPI?

The default driver win 98 installs on computers with an nforce 4 chipset causes a crash.

Without a driver windows fails to see a lot of you computers devices. (probably including your graphics card)

You should Use the plug and play Bios (fail safe) driver for the ACPI bios.

Edited June 11, 2009 by Kwibus

[robertbaer]

Do not know about ACPI drivers, first i heard that they might be useful or even needed.

The Win98 install was done with a different, much older board (and CPU), and it would be big time (a number of daze) to re-install as i would have to start from scratch: blank HD, install Win98SE with upteen programs, then Win2K and its umpteen programs, and try to get all the personal data (larger yet) across; ain't gonna happen.

Device manager has two "motherboard resources" (really useful and helpful and complete info, eh?) as not satisfied, default works for monitor; am using a universal VBE9x driver for VESA mode 103 (600x800 256 colors) as the best found that actually works ("VBE MiniPort" by Anapa Corp).

Does NOT work: UNIVBE.DRV - Win98SE continuously beeps at load and then freezes; muchly UNrecommended!

My PCIE video board is the NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS; i have no clue as to the equivalent NVIDIA chip number on the motherboard.

Sound does not work; the RealTek ALC662 chip drivers for older OSes are conspicusly absent (the ADS PTV-390 Conexant driver is also for "modern" OSes).

Forgive me but i have really messy notes; things scratched out, notes added thenscrached, etc - BUT somewhere i got what seemed to be a proper driver for use in Win98SE; the Wdm_a406.exe which runs and *looks* like it installs.

Other than that, it DOES NOTHING.

Cannot say anything about the ethernet port; cannot test it as have no hardware for that.

USB works except for a very wierd Verbatim "drive", the version i have was unique of 20 or so that are of identical type and name by them; used a universal "stack" program called "nusb32e.exe" which works like a charm.

*

Sorry about all of the info, but i think that others using Win98SE might want to know about possible options.

**

Meanwhile, how do i get KernelEx to work? (and test it)

[Kwibus]

How many system devices are present ? (under contolpanel -> System -> device manger -> sytem devices)

On my computer which also has an nforce 4 chipset i have about 25.

if you have substantially fewer there probably is no driver for the bios installed.

I am not entirely sure if all the steps mentioned here are correct but i 'd rather not deinstall the driver to find out:

What could work is:

Go to add new hardware in the control panel

click next twice

now you should see a list of unistalled devices

one of them should have a name with ACPI Bios something

select this and press next

I think you should now be able to select "display a list of all drivers in a seleted location"

then select show all hardware and select plug and play bios (fail safe driver)

I hope this works for you.

[robertbaer]

Did not count number of devices, but those that are not satisfied does not include ACPI; the list is:

Motherboard resources

Motherboard resources

PCI Bridge

PCI Card

PCI System Management Bus

Unknown Device

Last 4 are all grouped together.

I believe that without the PCI drivers, the MB resources cannot work; all related to one of the "bridges" (North bridge or South bridge) not having software support.

And that is why i tried KernelEX and all of the patches i could manage: registry changes to make it see WinXP and 5.10.2600 and same in various boot and boot support files.

Came to find out on an Win98SE NG that KernelEx was intended to support only a few programs for the writer only and thus at this time is not useful in a more general sense.

So maybe because no bridge support the NVIDIA drivers have no hope of working.

**

ACPI is disabled in the BIOS setup; as i remember that has to do with power fault monitoring etc and i have no need for power flim-flam.

[dencorso]

Well I don't think you can install drivers for a Socket AM2+ with nVidia chipset on 98/ME at all but it is interesting enough to know you can actually install and run the OS on it.

Well, while not AM2+, RLoew (1) at the Day-to-day running Win 9x/ME with more than 1 GiB RAM thread, post #2, is a Socket AM2 machine with nVidia chipset, which is almost, although not quite, the same thing. And it already lacked drivers, but does run Win 98SE. For a multiboot machine I think it's good enough.

[robertbaer]

That is what i have..a multi-boot machine.

Started with Win98SE, added DOS then added Win2K which created the multi-boot choice menu.

But it sure would be (very) nice if the sound and video worked..the same way as it does in Win2K...

[eidenk]

Well I don't think you can install drivers for a Socket AM2+ with nVidia chipset on 98/ME at all but it is interesting enough to know you can actually install and run the OS on it.

Well, while not AM2+, RLoew (1) at the Day-to-day running Win 9x/ME with more than 1 GiB RAM thread, post #2, is a Socket AM2 machine with nVidia chipset, which is almost, although not quite, the same thing. And it already lacked drivers, but does run Win 98SE. For a multiboot machine I think it's good enough.

I am wondering what the performance is with only the drivers windows installs itself and viewing it through the perspective of building a beefy single core system to run 98/ME as it seems it is cheaper to buy an AM2 mobo, a 2.8 Ghz Athlon LE 1660 single core and a stick of 2GB DDRAM2, all new, than it is to buy a socket 939 board, a 2.8Ghz Athlon FX 57 and 2 x 1GB DDRAM, all second hand.

[Kwibus]

To Eidenk:

I have a computer with AM2

I did run a quick bench mark on it comparing win 98 versus win 2k

the bench marking program was not very up to date though.

benchmark used was freshdiagnose.

the only big difference i noticed was in hard drive reading and writing win2k perfomed 3 to 4 times faster.

win 2k also had a higher drystone and multimedia score.

win 98 had a better score for whetstone, graphics and memory.

Most of the drivers i use under win 98 are not default drivers however

If you have a better bench mark program in mind i could run it for you.

to robertbaer

I think you could use the PCI driver from the nforce 3 chipset although i think it should work with the default drivers as well because the driver does no need any extra files.

There are also a few driver you can use from the Nforce 4 chipset drivers for win 2k like the nforce4 hyper transport.

If you have so few devices under system you probably do not have a bios driver installed so i would recommand you try to install the plug and play bios failsafe driver and tell us what happend.

you could also try to send a pm to rloew his system is more similar to yours than mine.

Edited June 13, 2009 by Kwibus

[dencorso]

I am wondering what the performance is with only the drivers windows installs itself and viewing it through the perspective of building a beefy single core system to run 98/ME as it seems it is cheaper to buy an AM2 mobo, a 2.8 Ghz Athlon LE 1660 single core and a stick of 2GB DDRAM2, all new, than it is to buy a socket 939 board, a 2.8Ghz Athlon FX 57 and 2 x 1GB DDRAM, all second hand.

If such a board exists, I'd select an AM2 board having a Via chipset, because, then, there wouldn't be any driver problem, as all needed VIA drivers, including SATA and LAN, are well known and available. The big question is: does such a board exist? Edited June 13, 2009 by dencorso

[eidenk]

To Eidenk:

I have a computer with AM2

I did run a quick bench mark on it comparing win 98 versus win 2k

the only big difference i noticed was in hard drive reading and writing win2k perfomed 3 to 4 times faster.

This does sound pretty bad doesnt'it ?

Most of the drivers i use under win 98 are not default drivers however

If you have a better bench mark program in mind i could run it for you.

It would be intersting to know precisely what drivers you are using then.

Can't think about about another benchmark program right nowunfortunately but I think the one you've used is good enough.

[Kwibus]

about the slower hard disk

It mainly means that it wil take longer to load and save data. If the whole program fits in the memory of your computer it should not run more slowly it just takes longer to load. It may also take more time to process the data than it takes to load it. In that case you may not notice a difference in loading time or the difference is less than would be expected based on the hard disk speeds.

I do not think the benchmarking program i used is such a good program though as it gave very little performance difference between win2k en win 98 while i use a dual core processor.

I think the K8T900 is the last via chipset for AMD processors with win 98 drivers i could not find any mainboards with this chipset however.

the AM2V890-VSTA is an AM2 board with a via chipset.

I'll describe my system here in a little more detail

I thought i had a AM2 board but i just looked it up and it is an 939 socket the chipset i have however also supports AM2 so i hope there won't be any big differences differences.

main board is A8n-E

memmory i think it is 2x 512 and 2x 1024 mb of ddr400 ram

processor athlon 64 x2 3800+

graphics Gforce 6800 pci-E

harddisk 300gb pata

I am not using the onboard sound and network card yet instead i have a audigy 2 sound card and an realtek 8139 network card.

I also have a adaptech scsi controler

i will list all the weird drivers

the network card and the scsi card have official win98 drivers

The drivers i use for the graphics card are the unofficial 82.69 drivers.

I also had to install two files from rloew's demo ram limitation patch for it to work with more than 1 gb of physically inserted ram without the third file which locks up the computer after 10 minutes (it will have demo behind its name when you install the patch) i can use up to 1150 mb

with rloews demo patch i can use up to 2052 mb (i still have to contact rloew about it)

if i use more ram my sound cards stops working correctly

edit: with a different sound card I can use 3 GB Ram.

I use the nforce4 win2k drivers for the parallel sata and pata controllers.

according to the control panel they function correctly. i do not have a sata device so i cannot test it.

I use the win2k driver for the audigy 2 card

i also use the nforce4 win2k driver for the hypertransport bus.

I also have a Nvidea nforce pci system management driver i think it is from the nforce3 win 98 drivers but it could be from the nforce 4 drivers as well.

i use the plug and play (failsafe) driver from win 98 instead of an ACPI driver.

other than that i think all my drivers are the default win 98 drivers.

there still are a number of devices with problems

I have two direct access memory controllers listed one of them has a DMA conflict

the onboard sound card is disabled as well as the microsoft direct music synth from my audigy 2 card

the onboard nforce network controller is not working properly or does not have all the drivers installed.

futrther more i have the following devices listen under other devices for which no drivers are installed.

game port joystick

generic ide disk type 47

MPU-41 compatible

PCI input controller

PCI universal serial bus.

Edited June 23, 2009 by Kwibus

[dencorso]

300GiB PATA HDD with the default generic ide disk type 47???

You **NEED** to install LLXX's patched esdi_506.pdr, post haste, else you're heading towards a **BIG** HDD crash! Follow the link for > 137 GB HDD in my signature, get and install BHDD31e, before it's too late!

BTW, congratulations: you've solved some pretty difficult driver problems by using Win 2k drivers.

How did you install them? By hand, using the .infs grabbed from a Win 2k installation, perhaps?

P.S.: Are you running Win98FE or Win98SE?

Edited June 18, 2009 by dencorso